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> Results: Gothic II Gold
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Despite being widely regarded as one of the best role-playing games of all time, Gothic II remains merely a cult hit in North America, largely due to a late release and poor marketing outside of Germany. In preparation for the upcoming Gothic 3, Aspyr Media secured the publishing rights for a 'Gold' version of Gothic II, featuring both the original game and the first North American availability of the expansion pack Night of the Raven. The result is a budget priced role-playing game that would easily be the best of the year ... if it weren't two years old.
Gothic II tells the story of a man with no name and continues the events from the end of the original Gothic, but doesn't require the player to know anything about that first game. In fact, some of the additional material in the Gold edition further details the history of the world and connections between characters, but still allows you to role-play as though you have lost your memory and remember nothing from before the beginning of the game. The game world is huge; featuring only four loading zones which mean you could literally play for twenty hours without seeing a load screen. There are hundreds of quests and named characters with daily routines and differing schedules. As you progress, you gain experience through battles and by completing quests, building up skills and eventually joining a major faction such as becoming a Mercenary or Paladin or the very difficult career as a Fire Magician. You also join a minor faction such as the Thieves Guild. The Night of the Raven expansion allows alignments with Pirates and Bandits and joining the Water Magicians featured in the original Gothic. The game is completely single player oriented, both in terms of not having any multiplayer elements, and in only centering on the main character. While you have occasional companions and are sometimes tasked to protect someone, you never control any of the other characters. The gameplay is similar to a third person ﾑshooter' such as the Star Wars Jedi Knight games, in that you ﾑsteer' your character using the keyboard and can look at attack with the mouse. However, the control scheme is something that many new players find extremely hard to adjust to using. This is because the game is built to be almost entirely playable without the mouse. Indeed, experienced players develop control strategies that allow them to handle almost the entire game single-handed, and once you develop a workable control scheme it quickly becomes second nature.  The game has some other quirky features that make it even more difficult for new players. There are minor problems with the translations, but it is always merely awkward phrasing and never the unintelligible phrases found in too many translated games recently. There are also a few minor bugs that cause characters not to escort you to more than one place, or cause characters you are escorting to get lost if you are too far ahead, but these are rare and minor and the game provides a key to allow you to ﾑturn your head' while still traveling forward to make sure your escort is still behind you. The quest and journal system is one of the best and most detailed in any game, but the inventory system is simply an unlimited, categorized dump that accumulates hundreds of items over the course of the game. The biggest difference players will experience compared to most recent role-playing games is the difficulty. This game is hard and unforgiving. If you stray off the path, you die quickly and feel humiliated in a way most games have not done to players in years. This Gold edition has some changes to help you by offering hints, as well as offering multiple options to solve some early quests. However, even with these aids, the game throws many difficult challenges at the player from the beginning to the end of the game. Some of these are strategicﾗsuch as a group of bandits that have taken over a lighthouse, and use their strategic position and cover (and numbers) to kill the overly ambitious in about thirty seconds. Other challenges include the pure difficulty of enemies, but never do battles seem unfair or contrived, nor does the game utilize ﾑcheating' that many first-person shooters use to make missions more challenging. Last year the successful Xbox game Fable was brought to the PC with ~30% added content called The Lost Chapters. In that game, it was immediately clear where the original game ended and the added content began. As a player, you had completely developed by that time and done all core quests, so there was little left to do but follow the linear path to the ﾑfinal end'. The Night of the Raven adds perhaps 25% extra contentﾗthe game had taken me about sixty hours to complete on previous plays and just over eighty hours this timeﾗyet that content is threaded throughout the game to the point that only my prior experience with Gothic II told me what was ﾑnew'. The continuity in voice acting is broken only once across hours and hours of interwoven dialogue, and the plotlines and quests are expertly combined so that the new content feels like a natural extension of the original game. The new areas are wonderfully realized and different from the original. Where that game had a city, farms, forests, and an old valley with mountains and ice regions, the new areas include tropical beaches, barren deserts and swamps. There are new monsters and characters in the new areas as well. Many are variants of existing creatures, others entirely new.  It all combines into a truly excellent gaming experience. Once you get past the difficulty and get your controls set, you are totally hooked and immersed. Every effort you make is rewarded, and you can even refuseﾗor at least bemoanﾗstandard ﾑfetch and return' quests. Gothic II Gold combined with the Night of the Raven stands as easily the best PC role-playing game released in 2005, and manages to stand even taller among the giants of the role-playing genre. This game should be considered ﾑrequired playing' for any fan of PC role-playing games, and at the bargain price it is easily accessible to most gamers. 
Gothic II Gold is a mature game that features plenty of profanity, drug and alcohol use and abuse, prostitution, assassination, and brutality. Yet for all of that, it is fairly mild compared to many of the M-rated games that have come out in the past couple of years, because none of what happens seems gratuitous or pandering. Even getting intimate with a prostitute is handled as tastefully as I have ever seen in a mature game. Nevertheless, the game fully deserves and earns a Mature rating and an Adult age recommendation.
This review edited by Dave Long Comments? Chat about it in our forums! Format For Printing | Tell A Friend | Digg | Slashdot | del.icio.us | Buy This Game Browse Amazon.com's selection of "Gothic" themed games Home > Review Archive > Video Games > Results: Gothic II Gold |
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